Episode 113: Monique Dubbelman

Introducing Monique Dubbelman

Monique is an independent UX designer from the Netherlands. She builds websites for small business owners and teaches at the Amsterdam University of Applied Science. When she’s not behind her computer, she likes to whisper to earthworms in her garden.

Show Notes

Website | Boe Media

Twitter | @boemedia

Preferred Pronouns | She/Her

Episode Transcript

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions and our guests share their stories, ideas, and perspectives.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 113.

Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Monique Dubbelman. Monique is an independent UX designer from the Netherlands. She builds websites for small business owners and teaches at the Amsterdam University of Applied Science. When she’s not behind her computer, she likes to whisper to earthworms in her garden. How lovely! Welcome, Monique. Thanks for joining us.

Monique: Thanks for having me.

Liam: Monique, it’s our pleasure. Thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Monique: Well, I live in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. I’ve been working independently since 2011, I think. I have a background in graphical design, the graphical industries. I abandoned that when I was in my early 30s. I think I had my first midlife crisis then or maybe the second already, I don’t know. I moved to a rural area, started my own web shop in organic gardening. That crisis really hit me when I was doing that so I had to go back to my old profession. I’ve always been doing web design on the side so I decided to pick that up professionally. That’s how I got where I am today.

Tara: How did you find WordPress?

Monique: Well, the web shop I had was building open source software. And it’s not that back in the days that I really understood open source, I was just looking for free software, to be honest. I originally build it with OsCommerce and after that with Magento, but I also felt the need to sort of do stories on my own garden and tell people my experiences. Not just only be salesy but also have stories to tell. I had that on wordpress.com, which was pretty fashionable back then.

Because I’ve been doing static web design, just HTML and CSS, but when I started doing it professionally, I sort of asked on Twitter like, “What are you all using?” I knew Drupal…In the meantime, I knew what open source was and I enjoyed open source, working with open source. So I asked around, like, what do people prefer Drupal, Joomla, and most of them said WordPress. Since I knew the backend already from the.com blog, that was sort of a no-brainer for me.

Tara: In Amsterdam, what’s the WordPress community like there? Have you connected with them, and how did you discover them?

Monique: I’ve only been living in Amsterdam full-time for a year now. I had a long-distance relationship before that. I lived in Leiden, which is a slightly smaller town in the Netherlands that hosted the first European WordCamp before I ever heard of the WordPress community at all.

In Leiden, I organize a meetup with Rian Rietveld. But in Amsterdam, there isn’t really active community, I learned. The question is why? And everybody keeps asking themselves that question. Until this summer in WordCamp up in Berlin, I met people from all over the world I knew and I met people from Amsterdam I didn’t know. It was like, “Oh, you live around the corner and I don’t know you.” Again, we asked that question: Why is nothing happening in Amsterdam?